EDITOR’S NOTE DART Rail-At Last

WHOA. LIGHT RAIL…SUBWAYS...DALLAS? I’ve been writing and editing stories about DART and its travails for more than a decade now, and I still can’t believe it’s finally happening, Yes, sonny, I remember the Lone Star Transit Authority, the Interim Regional Transit Authority, the Final Service Plan, Ted Tedesco, Pre-Metro, SMART, the 140-mile rail plan, the 93-mile rail plan, the even shorter rail plan, and the rest. Heck, I remember Charles Anderson when he looked young and cheerful. Or young, anyway.

And I still can’t believe it.

Light rail…subways..Dallas? Yes.

Two kinds of people have been wrong all along about DART-those who sought to excuse its many budget-busting blunders and its squandering of the public’s good will by citing the nobility of its cause; and those whose loathing of government and taxation have blinded them to mass transit’s promise and utility. To them, DART’s failure is a simple syllogism: All government programs are wasteful, stupid, and corrupt. DART is a government program. Therefore…

The long struggle over mass transit in Dallas, perhaps second in passion only to the battle over the 14-1 council structure, will not end when DART opens its long, long-awaited light rail service from downtown to Oak Cliff this month. As writer Jim Henderson notes in “Let the Trains Begin,” (page 21), 40 bright-yellow cars running on 20 miles of track do not a revolution in transportation I make. “Rail rules!” crows one DART press release, but the conversion of even a fraction of Dallas drivers to rail travel will be a slow and painstaking process-and I say that as one who hates our time-sucking traffic jams, worries about pollution, welcomes rail, and can’t wait to take the train to work, which I’ll do as soon as northward service opens out to Park Lane. (Well, okay, except for the days when I need my car to stop at the grocery store or meet someone for lunch.)

This magazine has cast a cold eye on DART and its workings for a lot of years. Our May 1988 story, “The Three-Billion-Dollar Boondoggle,” played a modest part in the defeat of the bond election that would have given DART the financial green light to build the rail system. We didn’t think the numbers added up, and we said so. Back, back to the drawing board.

So they went back. Faces changed, The suburbs had their say in a series of pullout elections, all but two voting to stay in DART. The buses kept running. Central Expressway around Mockingbird disappeared into what seemed to be the crater of an atomic-bomb blast. And now rail is here.

And now that it’s here, let’s give it a chance. Let’s see what rail can do to improve the quality of life in Dallas, starting with downtown. When a savvy guy like Cliff Booth, owner of Southwest Properties Group, says that the West End DART station was a major plus in his decision to buy and develop the four Await Buildings-700,000 square feet adjacent to the rail line-that’s worth a pause for reflection.

Will DART trains whisk away all our transportation agonies? Nope. Has the system cost far more than its early backers claimed it would? You’d better believe it. But the status quo isn’t free either. Forget pollution and the Environmental Protection Agency’s threats to limit industrial growth if we don’t do something about air quality in North Texas. Maybe we can tie them up in court forever. But look at five miles of frozen traffic on LBJ or Central. Figure up the lost productivity of those hundreds of stranded workers. Then multiply the scene 200 or so times a year.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill (the military allusion is apropos), this is not the end of the struggle to bring mass transit to Dallas. It is not even the beginning of the end. But, come June 14, we may at last see the end of the beginning.